AT&T responds to MMS criticism
After getting roundly beaten about the head and shoulders for delaying once again the introduction of MMS, AT&T finally has responded to some of the criticism that has been leveled against it.
Recently, AT&T announced that they were going to miss their self-imposed “before the end of summer” deadline for implementing an MMS protocol, resulting in yet another round of complains by users. MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service, by the way, is a telecommunications standard for sending messages that include multimedia objects, such as images, audio, video, and rich text. It is a standard available for use from almost all wireless carriers, but not from AT&T, according to . As an example, Verizon has has an MMS service available for some time, and the iPhone has been ready for MMS (and tethering) since the introduction of iPhone OS 3.0.
AT&T has retaliated with the reintroduction of Seth the Blogger Guy in Youtube videos, who has made previous appearances to talk about subjects such as Wi-Fi auto-authentication and iPhone 3GS upgrade eligibility. This time around, Seth is talking about the complaints regarding MMS and his tone is a bit different. Instead of being upbeat and perky, Seth the Blogger Guy seems a little wary this time, maybe even a little defensive, when talking about the MMS issue.
In his newest incarnation, Seth begins his video a little plaintively by saying, “Look, we see the discussions on the Web, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook — so we thought it would be a good idea to take what’s being said head-on.” Seth goes on to explain that this whole MMS thing is complicated and difficult, and that AT&T is experiencing a heavy growth in smartphone usage, and that is complicating the entire issue of MMS, and a few others. He goes on to say that “We’ve been working for months to prepare the radio access controllers in our network to support this launch. That means calibrating base stations all over the country, and frankly, that’s a very time-consuming process.”
Without putting too fine a point on it, it seems that Seth is trying to explain away the obvious, and to do so in situations where other carriers have already managed to do what AT&T is making excuses for. This is not so much an explanation of the situation as it is a series of half-baked excuses for how hard it is to do what AT&T should be expected to do, and which its competitors have already done. Alas, how far Ma Bell has fallen from grace…
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September 5th, 2009
Its crazy a carrier in 2009 can’t do something every other carrier on the planet has been doing for years.
And yeah, I’m a stockholder. :(